


if death is the last appointment, we're all in the waiting room

by xerampelinae



Series: pull the blackout curtains down [5]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crack, M/M, playing fast and loose with canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-05 00:13:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15852315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xerampelinae/pseuds/xerampelinae
Summary: “Keith handles Shiro’s sword marvellously,” Kolivan says guilelessly. There’s a dull clunking as Matt and Lance simultaneously drop their water pouches. “Is there something wrong, Paladins?”“Maybe space euphemisms are different from earth euphemisms?” Hunk says in a hopeful undertone.-In which the Voltron Coalition is exposed to Shiro and Keith's relationship and Suffers through an abundance of euphemism and innuendo.





	if death is the last appointment, we're all in the waiting room

**Author's Note:**

> There's a point where you have to admit that your attempts at humorous asides no longer count as codas and I guess this is that point.

The thing about Keith is that he’s not modest, but he’s also not a braggart. He doesn’t dial back his piloting and fighting, is simply competent and confident in his skills. It’s unfairly hot, objectively, even for a lesbian without any substantial shades of heterosexuality. And that’s the problem, Pidge thinks, Keith’s hot and he never fights harder than when he’s protecting Shiro--it takes everything that makes Keith himself and turns it up to eleven--which Pidge can respect. What Pidge _cannot_ respect is the shy look Shiro gives Keith when this happens.

It’s a cursed thought but Matt was right: this is 100 percent _the panties comin’ off, off._ 1

Thanks, Matt, Pidge thinks, definitely didn’t need those lyrics to come to mind every time Keith comes charging in to save Shiro. Shiro’s saved them all--they’re Voltron, after all, they’re sort of in danger _constantly--_ but statistically Shiro-Keith saves are more common than any combination of Shiro-all-other-paladins saves.

Pidge still regrets running those numbers. But they were necessary to drag Matt back into this hell. Lance and Hunk are incapable of quantifying this sort of suffering, and anyways, Matt knew Shiro and Keith before the launch. Matt’s always been in Pidge’s corner. Sometimes even for much worse things than this.

_It happened again,_ Pidge types singlehandedly and sends off without looking. Shiro and Keith are looking intensely into one another’s eyes. The rest of them are trying not to look but failing, because those two are very beautiful men. Holding each other very tenderly.

_Rendezvous before the next quintant,_ is Matt’s return message.

_Shiro’s nipples are out because of battle damage and Keith’s just holding him,_ Pidge sends back. She watches Shiro light up with embarrassment as he realizes the extent of his clothing damage. Keith is unbothered by the way his own damaged clothing reveals the defined musculature of his abdomen and a peak of a trail of dark hair from his navel, instead helpfully covering Shiro up with his hands. It’s a Look but it works. For both of them. Allura is staring; the horror on her face is probably her inability to look away. Coran is looking at them with a Stiff Upper Lip Jeeves expression crossed with the sort of concentration more often associated with use of a microscope. Lance is hiding his face in his hands and Hunk’s shoulder, while Hunk was looking at the ceiling and reciting recipes, and honestly Pidge is trying to focus on them instead of the others.

_Coming as quickly as possible._

Pidge winces at the phrasing.

-

Matt’s shuttle arrives shortly after Kolivan and a new cadre of Blades. 

“The Red Paladin, Keith,” Kolivan says, clearly running through introductions, “is both the Right Hand of Voltron and a fellow Blade.”

Unfortunately, Matt thinks portentously, no one thought to screen the Blade’s questions. Disaster looms overhead.

“Black Paladin,” one says, “is it you that controls Voltron’s sword?”

“No,” Shiro says, hand settling automatically on Keith’s shoulder, “that would be Keith.”

“Keith handles Shiro’s sword marvellously,” Kolivan says guilelessly. There’s a dull clunking as Matt and Lance simultaneously drop their water pouches. “Is there something wrong, Paladins?”

“Maybe space euphemisms are different from earth euphemisms?” Hunk says in a hopeful undertone.

A discreet pan around the room shows a general state of confusion (Blades), vague discomfort (Altean) and horror (human). And then there’s Keith. Calm, nonplussed.

“Please excuse us,” Matt says, trying to hide the way he’s almost vibrating out of his skin in horror, “we need to--there’s an urgent meeting. Galaxy Trio plus awesome brothers, you know?”

Without waiting for a response, Matt grabs Pidge and sprints out of the room with Lance and Hunk on their heels.

“Did I say something odd?” Kolivan asks.

“Uh,” Shiro says.

“Hm,” Keith says.

-

“So you see,” Coran says, “earthlings have elaborate reproductive rituals that may be preceded by trials of physical exertion and combat, with intensive regional variation.”

“I see,” Kolivan says. It is a baldfaced lie. “And it operates under great secrecy?”

“Oh, yes,” Coran says. “I would definitely say so.”

“I must apologize for raising the topic,” Kolivan says, “however accidentally.”

“You are a paragon of polite behavior,” Coran says.

-

“Keith,” Kolivan says, once he’s found him in a quiet observatory. “I must apologize for bringing up the topic of courtship--it was not intended, and i do hope that it did not offend or gather ill luck.”

Keith cocks his head. “Don’t worry about it.”

“But your comrades--” Kolivan protests, thinking of how distressed they had looked in their departure. None of them had been sighted since.

“Galra don’t use euphemisms, huh,” Keith says thoughtfully. Kolivan shakes his head to confirm the unfamiliar term fed through their universal translators. “On earth, your comment would be a verbal substitution suggestive of Shiro and me having sex.”

“Oh,” Kolivan says. Mortification is a great wave crashing over him. “I apologize.”

“Why?” Keith says, shrugging. “It’s true.”

A cold sweat breaks out on Kolivan.

“I think Coran and the princess have the wrong idea about things,” Keith says, “but they did finally program door locks.”

Kolivan chokes and flees as the door opens to admit Shiro.

“Is something wrong?” he hears Shiro say. The acuity of his hearing betrays him in this moment: he can hear the bare rustle of Shiro’s prosthetic palm slide over the sturdy material of Keith’s jacket. Nothing vanishingly risque but too intimate to watch too long. Keith’s boots shift in their grip of the floor, trouser fabric sliding as he shifts his weight, leans into Shiro’s touch. Kolivan wishes for a moment that the fabric of the Blades’ garb were a little less silent in motion, if only for something to conceal what he can hear.

“Just going over some cultural differences,” Keith says, and finally, blessedly the door seals shut before his breath transforms into something anticipatory.

-

“We have _seen_ things,” the Blue Paladin says with horrified, glazed eyes when Kolivan asks. “I can’t believe you said what you did.”

“Not just seen--” the Yellow Paladin says, “ _heard_ as well--”

“It seems that earthling courtships are not chaste,” Coran says, the princess nodding in agreement.

“I mean--” Pidge says. “They can be--?”

“By Marmora’s great blade,” Kolivan says in muted horror too deep to see his companion’s horrified faces at the potential return of phallocentric sword euphemisms. “What will I tell his dam? I must fight for his honor--”

“Why?” says Keith. The room goes silent as one as they turn to the entryway.

“The common area isn’t the best place to talk about us behind our backs, guys,” Shiro says.

Kolivan’s hand moves slowly to his blade. Chatter kicks up in the room. Matt and Pidge have an intense eye-based conversation about the necessity of intervening in whatever follows and what this will mean for the Voltron Coalition. Maybe it’s time for them to take a family vacation to visit Olkarion.

“We’re married,” Keith says. The room abruptly goes silent. “No fights are necessary for my honor, unless you want me there fighting for Shiro’s honor.”

“God,” Matt says, “you’d do it, too. This is gay culture. It’s like a soap opera but it started as gay culture versus government bureaucracy and now it’s a space opera with mecha warfare, and I don’t know, dramatic discoveries of someone’s alien love child.”

“No,” Shiro says with an uncomfortably fond look at Keith. It’s a good thing they’re too far to touch because everyone else is already dying from too much exposure to their weird romantosexual rituals of affection. They are too powerful. “This is marriage.”

“Matt,” Pidge says, “you’re my brother and I love you but you’re a meme-loving fuck. Also, aren’t space operas inherently queer?”

“It’s true,” Matt confesses. “It’s all my fault.”

“Anyways,” Keith says with a razor’s edge to his grin, “What’s this about fighting for my honor on another’s behalf?”

Kolivan accepts the nunville from Coran and downs it without a thought for its taste. This will not be a conversation for sobriety.

-

The Blades bring with them a fruit that looks like a pomelo but tastes like plum, as thanks for the Castle’s hospitality. Unfortunately, this means they have to watch Keith chase stray droplets of space plum nectar down his wrist and also have to watch Shiro watching Keith use his tongue. It’s not eating a space banana, but it’s a little much for them. Even the Blades are blushing a little bit.

“How--how long is your tongue?” Lance mutters incredulously.

Keith shrugs and Shiro offers him another section of space plum, flashing him a too-fond grin. “Thanks, Shiro,” he says.

“You’ve got a little--” Shiro says after Keith’s next bite sends a trickle of nectar down the corner of his mouth.

“Mm?” Keith says, tipping his head inquisitively up. Shiro leans in close, hand rising. Everyone squeaks when Shiro’s hand does not do anything reasonable like pass Keith a napkin or (less reasonably and still too intimately) wipe Keith’s jaw clean. No, Shiro puts his hand on Keith’s jaw to steady it and laps up the nectar.

The fondness that they emanate is blinding. 

“Is this--” a young Blade asks, “is this normal for your species?”

“Er,” Matt says.

-

“Maybe one blessed day we will forget all that we have seen,” the princess says, unable to conceal her glazed expression of horror.

“Our theory is that some terrestrial--well, mammalian--characteristics evoke a primal fear in Alteans,” Pidge whispers. “By which we mean uncanny valley nipples.”

Kolivan steals the nunville from Coran’s hand before he can take a sip. Coran barely manages to suppress a yelp at that.

“Either that or there’s some cultural hang-ups like what earth left behind a couple centuries ago,” Matt adds, ponderous. “I mean, who knows how old they actually are without the big sleep included? Or maybe their reproductive morphology is stunningly different.”

Old enough to know when entrapped, Kolivan thinks, but too young to maneuver free or to avoid the next trap. The younger Blades have made subtle, effective displays of their training to vanish from the room where Kolivan cannot. He will not forget their disloyalty.

“God, your poster was a work of art,” Pidge says proudly, eyes misting. “It’s making me miss Mom even more, thinking about it.”

“She was so proud,” Matt says, pulling Pidge into an easy, fond hug. “I bet she’d be jumping at the chance for empirical data.”

“No!” Lance shrieks. “Nononono. No. You are not going to ask anyone to whip out their space genitalia for science.”

“But science,” Pidge says, but sighs. “Got it. No sexual harassment. Which means no asking Keith or Shiro about whatever sex they may or may not be having. And also not barging into their rooms.”

“I learned my lesson,” Lance says, eyes hollow.

-

Then there’s an ill-executed systems update that forgets the existence of the locking mechanisms.

“Shiro?” Matt says, knocking on the door of his quarters. Before he can glance at Kolivan, the door opens, revealing minimal decor, several familiar sets of clothing folded up, and the long, bare curve of Keith’s back, and the lean, strong line of his thigh as he turns ever so much where he sits on the bed.

“Oh,” Matt says. “Oh no.”

Keith is naked and--it turns out--on top of Also Naked Shiro, who sits up with a bracing hand on Keith’s hip and a muted expression of _something_.

“Matt?” Shiro says, like maybe he’s just finding out that castlewide communications are down and Voltron needs to launch to fight a Galran armada, rather than being part of the discovery that the castlewide privacy mechanisms have spontaneously failed while having his dick in his partner while talking with Matt and Kolivan. 

It’s not really anyone’s fault, some part of Matt realizes, but this is worse than accidentally counting Shiro’s hickies in the days after the Kerberos launch and knowing exactly who had put them there. This is way, way worse than zoning out in the locker room and accidentally staring at a very beautiful person’s body in a very creepy way. Shiro has always been eyecandy but no one really wanted to make him uncomfortable or ever let him know. In a sample of Garrison students, _n_ being students surveyed, a total of _n-1_ were attracted to Shiro and it was only _n-1_ because Shiro wasn’t that into himself. Even people who weren’t sexually attracted to anyone found Takashi Shirogane to be aesthetically pleasing.

The siblings Holt have always found comfort in science and technology.

“Matt?” Keith says, voice rough and low, catching suggestively in his throat, “Kolivan? What’s wrong?” 

And oh no, that’s even worse, Matt thinks. This is Keith’s sex voice. This is too much information on Sex Having Keith for someone who never wants to have sex with Keith, even if he has had some sort of unexpected but highly effective glow-up.

“It--it can wait,” Kolivan says finally, hand catching on Matt’s hood and dragging him back away from the doorway. “Apologies for the disruption.”

-

Matt can’t bring himself to ask if he had imagined the moaning as they fled the hallway, and Kolivan doesn’t bring it up either.

They have more important things to do like initiate a red alert to the rest of the castle and to fix the problem before it happens again. And hopefully preventing it from ever happening again.

“That bastard,” Matt says later to Pidge as they scan the system updates for the fatal error. “He just let me face them, like I wasn’t also horrified at what I saw.”

“There, there,” Pidge says, patting his head like he’s Bae-bae and a few headpats will solve his problems. “I’m sure he just froze up.”

“Guh,” Matt says. “I need to do something other than think about this, give me a project.”

-

“No one told you that Keith’s mom was an alien, did they?” Pidge stage-whispers as they look at the Green Lion’s stealth mode for areas of improvement.

“He _what?”_ Matt shouts. “I was kidding about the involvement of an alien love child!”

-

Downtime often means time spent in the Lions’ hangars, tinkering and filling time. Keith and Shiro are fond of taking their Lions out and playing tag--the rest have tried joining them, but it’s a little too much like flirtation for the rest of them to tolerate.

Today, though--Shiro is listening patiently to Pidge and Matt discuss upgrading the Lions because no one’s done any major rehab or updates to them since Zarkon took a fast Lion to Bad Imperialism Murder Town and murderously refused to come back. Keith slips into orbit around Shiro and they move seamlessly into a chaste, lingering kiss before Keith’s disappearing across the hangar with a cohort of Blades for a training mission.

“Did--did he come all this way just to do that?” Pidge asks.

Shiro just beams.

-

“You’re lucky,” Pidge confides later with a reassuring pat to Kolivan’s shoulder. “Legitimately. It might not seem that way but anyways you kinda seem like you a dick what with withholding familial information from an orphan. But, we had to stage Coran and Allura walking in on Shiro and Keith before they gave us lock mechanism coding.

“It was pretty, pretty bad. We’d get excited and absentminded. Dorm living ruined our boundaries, I guess? Or maybe that was exposure to Lance. He’s got a pretty extended family.”

Kolivan stares at Pidge in mounting horror. He winces at the phrasing. It seems like something a human could and would turn into one of their mysterious and terrible euphemisms. 

“Not like any of us saw much--we’re not that terrible of teammates, I don’t think, I mean we were kind of dicks about the half-Galra thing and crap we never apologized for that, is Keith the only one who ever apologizes when we get mad and say dumb stuff? but--we’ve all seen things that cannot be unseen,” Pidge continues.

Kolivan wonders if he’s drunk enough to forget everything he’s learned in the last quintant. Knowing his luck, he hasn’t. He almost wishes his bid for an honor duel had been successful.

-

A garbled but coded transmission arrives at a secure terminal on Warlord Ranveig’s command ship. “Your young knife,” the embedded Blade frowns at the message and its archaic terminology, “would rule this universe with but the inclination.”

Krolia writes off the message as sleep-deprived ramblings until it is far too late for any emotional preparation or evasive maneuvering.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I just hit 1000 kudos on ao3--more than half of which for Voltron works--so this is my thank-you for everyone's support. This is an amazing community.  
> Title is a paraphrase of a lyric from Fall Out Boy's "Church"; 1 is from Nicki Minaj's "Superbass" for which this fic was almost named because it got me started writing this.  
> Feel free to ping me on tumblr at xerampelinaekiss if you want to chat about Voltron!


End file.
